since i was a little kid (and i’m sure before i was), every year next to the LIE, lefrak city has put up huge seasons greetings/happy holidays signs and brought up long strands of lights from the bottom of their sign to the top floor of between the buildings to make the shape of a triangle for christmas trees (i guess/assume?) and this year they put up this LED nonsense. a RED “snowflake” (looks more like a starburst?) in the middle and a bunch of straight line lights as tall as the snowflake on both sides of it.  and it’s only on the awning of the building…

i flickr searched and googled the shit out of lefrak city/xmas lights and i couldn’t find any great pictures of what they used to display, just this one:

at any rate, it’s a queens/nyc tradition that’s been broken… kinda sucky lefrak!

so i was passing by with my mom today and we got to even more talking about lefrak city.  since my mother grew up in forest hills, i assumed she’d had friends that lived there or something over the years… turns out i was right.

when they were built, they were for “middle-class/working” families, but my mother said they were more like luxury apartments.  she confirmed that she was in and out of there a lot, and she also told me that my aunt carol had an apartment up in there back when those apartments were actually still “classy”.

when mom was a teenager/twenty-something she was big into disco (oy vey, ma…) and hung out at a lot of spots in forest hills.  she said one night she was at some club or discotheque called “the menagerie” and was hanging out with some dude and she and her girlfriends all ended up going back to his house (haha #giggity but no, no, no…) and his dad was some big time radio DJ from back then.   she said his apartment was gorgeous, couldn’t remember his name, though…

she also told me at one point when she was working in the management offices there in the 70′s (when it started falling to shit because of the newer-classes of residents), that she would get mail to the office that had dead rats/roaches and water bugs in it because the buildings management  weren’t exterminating them.  how gross!

the entire idea of why that community was built seems so cool… too bad it’s gone to shit.

jess: (blahbbity blah blah, yakkity yak, chit chat) oh ew! there are a bunch of those big, poisonous mushrooms growing on the side of the tree in front of my house…
mom: you know not to eat those, right?
jess: :silence:
mom: oh, just wait until you have children…

meanwhile, i’m STANDING OUTSIDE OF THE APARTMENT THAT I PAY FOR EVERY MONTH ON MY OWN, like a grown-up, lol…

i remember being in the car with my mother and she was trying to talk me into getting the surgery and going in bravely, without a screaming episode and what not… and i remember my aunt carol was with us in the car and she too, was trying to calm me down or brace me for what was about to happen. my mother wound up bribing me with buying every piece of every she-ra play sets and dolls/figures if i behaved…
#gocatra #goshe-ra #gocrystalcastle #best

so we get to this hospital and i remember my mother going in with me, walking through an awesome play room that i wanted to stay in, being wheeled around through the halls/rooms, two sets of steel double doors and finally also being on the operating table. my mother couldn’t be with me, and i remember seeing all the tools they were using for the procedure being out. and really fucking shiny and scary.

i also remember fighting and being strapped down for the whole thing while staying awake.

whenever the whole ordeal was finished, my mother told me that i didn’t misbehave at all and she felt horrible because i told her all of the tools were out and she realized how scared i was… she said she heard me screaming through both sets of heavy double doors, and that’s why i ended up getting everything she-ra.

i still have a scar from that splinter/the stitches… brutal.

we waited for four stinkin’ hours and never got in for our ink – but we all had a really good time either way, just laughin’ it up together for a while…  and it wasn’t so nasty hot out either…  the only unbearable thing was that i had to pee the entire time…  ugh, now the next friday the 13th won’t be until next may…  guess next time i’m going to take the day off instead of leaving “early”…  i really wanted this tattoo, man…  it was a pair of hands, cut at the wrist with blood dripping holding up the middle finger for the 1 and three fingers on the other hand for the 3 to make the 13…  it would have looked so cute next to my misfits skull…  

afterward, steve and i had a really good talk the other night after the whole waiting ink ordeal…  (steve is my ex – we broke up almost two years ago…  our friendship has been kinda walking-on-eggshells strange) and got a lot out in the open…  i think this whole communicating with everyone so openly is quite therapeutic and beneficial…  at least now i feel like steve and i can hang out without worrying about the bullshit we both had on our brains, and be really good/close friends.  he really is one of my best friends in life despite all the bullshit that we went through and the stupid/selfish things i’ve put him through.

then i went to my friends frank and gina’s to help them paint some walls in their apt…  an accent wall and a small office… the colour in their office is awesome and i think i’m going to use it as an accent colour in my apartment…  in the middle of my apartment, there’s a part that comes down from the ceiling to separate the areas…  i think i’m going to paint the underside of that the blue colour that they used.  it’s called jamaica bay (which can be seen to the right…)

today i was a bum and didn’t do jack shit. i finished my “dream on” marathon.  i’m mad that they didn’t release the other seasons…  i was really on a roll here…  ugh, such is my life with DVD marathons and shows i love so dearly<3

#worst

mom: oh i saw the tucci brothers, god are they gorgeous. what are their names again?
me: mike and billy
mom: oh yeah, that’s right. which is the one you used to hang out with?
me: mike
mom: oh, right.
me: did billy still look on the crazy side?
my sister: they both kind of looked the same, with long hair
mom: that mike… (saying something along the lines of “if i were twenty years younger i’d”…)
me: (with puzzled look) jesus, ma!!
mom: (laughing) what?? he’s cute…
me: oh, i know. and i hope you know that i hit that… so, ha.
mom: :gags:
my sister: :gags:

lol

“what you eat during pregnancy can affect your baby for his or her entire life!”

…oh, really?
my mother told me she ate at least a package of oreo’s a day and a shit ton of pizza…

hmm.
where does that leave me?

mom: i borrowed some cds you left upstairs for my itouch, that OK? …it was the police and green day
me: greenday? which album?
mom: :fumbles to reach it on the shelf: oh, i don’t know whichever one you had up there
me: greenday?
mom: yes …i LOVE green day
me: o_o

these will always remind me of my mother<3
i was raised on these full albums. on repeat.
(hover over the thumbnail for the title if you’d like to know what an album is.)

now this may not seem like a strange thing ordinarily, but my mother:

a) is allergic to perfume, so it definitely wasn’t any type of perfume or air freshener.
b) never has flower scented candles.
c) couldn’t have fresh cut flowers in the house because of our cat josie, who thoroughly enjoys eating fresh flowers.

also: my mother is kind of a medium – she’s got some stories that scare the shit out of me… so when she feels something, i’m a believer.

so now with all that being said… i sat there for a good hour not saying anything about this strange, STRONG smell of fresh cut flowers thinking she’d accuse me of doing acid or some shit… so i started getting chills about it, it was freaking me out… she went into the kitchen to get a drink, came back and asked me if i was smelling them too.

she said she felt something was behind us for a while, but didn’t want to say anything because she knew it’d scare me… she said whatever it was, was good and not harmful… and as soon as she acknowledged it, it went away. she said the feeling, and i stopped smelling flowers.

i have asked my mother on numerous occasions what my chest tattoo reads, and she has no idea.
ITS ONLY TWO WORDS, lol

what if she had to identify my decapitated body or something?
i’ve had the damn thing for nearly two years…

i love jess-quizzing her, she gets so mad.

i don’t know why she gets so angry with me when she gets the answers wrong, she obviously doesn’t pay enough attention to me… lol